The avant-garde and its reflections in auteur cinema

How does cinema develop its own avant-garde? What are the key differences between the so-called avant-garde film and conventional cinema? What do narrative, sound, genre systems, and the system of audience expectations have to do with this division? How correct are such designations as “the avant-garde,” “experimental cinema,” etc.? What is the “film’s institutional mode of representation,” and how does it differ from the avant-garde? Evgeny Maisel's introductory lecture on cinematic avant-garde will cover these issues.

Inna Kushnareva will trace the development of the classic cinematic representation—the canonical “mise-en-scene” understood as a special, calibrated, and balanced relationship between the camera, bodies, and space. She will explain how this system later disintegrated, leading to the emergence of “post-cinema” in the 2000s, while also touching upon the notion of narrative cinema, its origin, and whether narrative is mandatory for the medium of film.

Minimalist trends emerged in avant-garde cinema long before the term “minimalism” was coined as well as decades before the term “avant-garde” formed in relation to film. It is easy to see that many (although far from all) avant-garde films are more “handicraft” in production than expensive studio movies. The lecture will focus on the avant-garde movements along with individual projects, implying the use of a minimum of expressive means, from the Absolute film of the 1920s to Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966).

If guided by the basic concepts of the classical system of representation, involving camera, bodies, and space, then minimalism is one of the ways of its gradual destruction. Minimalism is the victory of space over bodies. Participants in the talk will discuss this cinematic movement using, as examples, the works of select directors, including James Benning, Lisandro Alonso, Tsai Ming-liang, etc.

The search for what is beyond the rational, logical, narrative representation of the subject, as well as the cult of the unconscious, unite a wide range of filmmakers and experimenters traditionally ranked among the avant-garde. The lecture will focus on Parisian extremism and the 1920s’ impressionism, psychodrama discovered by Maya Derain, as well as the development of these ideas in the films of Gregory Markopoulos, Kenneth Anger, and other directors.

Was there ever reality inherent in cinema? Participants will discuss the relationship of cinema with reveries, daydreaming, and hypnosis, making a foray into film theory (Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour). The way this is expressed through cinema will be analyzed on the example of films by such contrasting directors as Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Christopher Nolan.

Abstraction and surreal experimentations were not the only directions of struggle for what cinema could or should be. Another “front line” dividing the avant-garde from “conventional” strategies became the human body. In this regard, the participants will talk about the movement known as “avant-doc,” discuss the representation of body and physicality in the second and third waves of the avant-garde (Willard Maas, Stan Brakhage, etc.), with a dedicated focus on contemporary cinema, from Albert Serra and Bruno Dumont to Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab experimenters.

Body cinema shows reality through the lens of the body. Bodies conquer space and radically change their relationship with the camera in it. To understand how this is achieved, the group will address the works of Yvonne Rainer, Chantal Akerman, Philippe Garrel, Claire Denis, etc., while also discussing pop genres, such as giallo and body horror.

Warhol's films converge and transform all previously discussed themes: minimalism (Empire, Screen Tests), the special role of physicality (Chelsea Girls, etc.), and even the motif of dreaming, possibly without seeing dreams (Sleep).

Andy Warhol synthesized affiliation with the underground and commercial success, innovative avant-garde aesthetics and star status. The talk will scrutinize Warhol’s most extreme films in terms of their position within the paradigm of avant-garde cinema and from the standpoint of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s “aesthetics of presence,” which also had a particular influence on slow cinema of the subsequent eras.

Even though sci-fi film and conventional avant-garde cinema may seem antagonists, the avant-garde and science fiction are in certain ways very much the same thing. The lecture will focus on the avant-garde’s ambition to grasp reality, in particular the connection between avant-garde practices and virtual reality (VR).

The talk will be based on why sci-fi blockbusters are much closer to the avant-garde than classic cinema. The theoretical research of André Bazin, Lev Manovich, and Sean Cubitt will help to clarify this question.

The surrealists adored eccentric comedy, which had a lot in common with the avant-garde. Eccentricity as a genre, however, quickly reached reflexivity in the work of Jacques Tati and turned into metacomedy. Unsurprisingly, Tati's influence subsequently spread to non-comedy genres.

The avant-garde is no stranger to eccentric ideas. The lecture will help trace the American avant-garde’s eccentricity and comedic traditions, from Mack Sennett’s comedies to the masters of the 1960s’ underground cinema, such as Robert Nelson, Ron Rice, Jack Smith, etc.